payables lockbox - how to document for board reviewers
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Payables Lockbox is a business class online bill pay system whose primary focus is to make improvements to your organization’s invoice approval process and payment processing. In order to effectively use Payables Lockbox, you should have a general understanding of how the system works and its overall feature set. The Payables Lockbox process is detailed in three primary steps.
Step 1: Strongroom Receives, Codes, and Images Invoices
Paper invoices are either mailed by the vendor to a PO Box setup for your business, or they are forwarded from your office location.
Invoices may also be sent electronically by email or fax.
Strongroom performs some initial coding on the invoice, such as the company for which the invoice applies, vendor, invoice number, invoice amount, invoice date and due date.
Step 2: Invoices Enter Customer’s Approval Process
The invoice enters into the first approver’s queue of the approval process.
A unique approval process can exist for each company defined in Payables Lockbox. Email notifications are sent to users in the approval process when they have invoices in their
queue. Customized scheduling for these invoices is available by user. Users may approve invoices to go to the next approver, or reject invoices to the previous user
in the process. Step 3: Strongroom Processes Payments Approved for Invoices At 4pm UCT every day, Strongroom runs a payment batch process that determines which invoices
have been approved for payment. For payments being made by check, Strongroom groups any relevant payments, adds remittance
information on the check stub, and then prints and mails the checks.
If any payments are being made by ACH (Automated Clearing House), Strongroom sends an ACH file to the customer’s bank for processing. Cutoff times for ACH payments may be dependent on your bank.
The Payables Lockbox system is very easy to use – Below you will find a step‐by step guide to follow
when using Payables Lockbox to review invoices.
To Review Invoices
Step 1 – You will then log onto the website with your user name and password. Note: You must be a registered user with the system in order to login. If you are experiencing difficulty, please contact your management company. Step 2 ‐ Once logged in, you will be on the “My Invoices” page.
Search for Invoices
Step 1 – From your “My Invoices” page, bring down the dropdown menu and click on “Invoice Search” as seen below.
Step 2 – You will be taken to the “Invoice Search” page. You can now search by several different
criteria such as Vendor, Amount, and Invoice Date. (Quick Search Items on the left do not apply to
reviewer only) It also allows for “wildcard” searches, so if you do not remember the account
number or vendor name exactly, you can put in 707* and it will populate every invoice that had
those three digits of an account number on it.
Step 3 – The next page will reflect your search results. You can click on the invoice number to review a pdf of the invoice and its history
To Search for Payments
Step 1 – Under the payments tab at the top of your screen, you will find that the only item on the dropdown menu is “Payment Search”. Click on that link.
Step 2 – You will be taken to the “Payment Search” page, which looks similar to the “Invoice Search” page in the previous section. Here you enter in search criteria for the payments.
Step 3 – You will then be taken to your search results. You can view the details of the payment and the
invoice related to the payment by clicking on the “view” tab.
Vendor Reports
Vendor reports can be generated two ways. First, from the invoice search page this will show every
invoice in the system for that vendor and the status of that invoice.
Second, from the payment search page this will show only the paid invoices for said vendor
Detail on invoices paid can be found by either clicking on the invoice or view tabs.
Expense Reports
Expense code reports can be generated from the invoice search page.
Expense code report to view details click invoice number
Sign up for Board Review
Association Name: _____________________________________________________________________
Your First and Last Name: ________________________________________________________________
Your e‐mail address: ___________________________________________________________________
Cummings Property Management will create an account using the above provided information. You will receive an e‐mail from StrongRoom ([email protected]) with registration instructions. Click on the link in step 1 of the email, accept the terms and then create your user name (6 characters long) and create a password (7 characters long, 1 digit, 1 upper case and 1 lower case letter). Once this is done you will be redirected to the “my invoices” page. In the future when you want to log on you will go to https://cummingspm.payableslockbox.com